Hi, I help run the #celeron channel on efnet so i have a little of extra experience of what chips are good and bad. From what I have heard the best chance to get a 300a to 450 is a PPGA Retail boxed 300a(OEM is a close 2nd). I know very few people that have gotten the ppga 300a and not hit 450. Of course you will need a PPGA motherboard(Abit BM6 is an EXCELLENT board), or a slocket adapater, such as the one mentioned in the post.

The only reason to buy a retail boxed CPU is to avoid remarks and previously abused processors. The bottom end of the PC parts market is full of people that are absolute scum. Computer shows are usually full of "dealers" selling dubious crap for cash to stupid buyers, but you even find the scam artists advertising in Computer Shopper. The last few years have seen scams such as fake cache chips on motherboards, remarked 486s, remarked Pentiums, remarked AMD chips, remarked RAM, Intel sound-a-like names for other chipsets (TXPro, VXPro, BXII, etc, etc,) on crap cheapo motherboards. ugghh..

I finally got around to compiling the kernel on my semi-new dual retail 300 ppga (MSI adapters) overclocked to 450. But I kept getting random compiler errors, mostly signal 11. I finally got it to compile by running make after the errors and deleting the.o file it had croaked on. The temp was around 90-96 F. Anybody get similiar problems?

Everyone seems hell bent on getting overclocked celerons to do things that are somewhat risky or difficult. I've found new Alpha 500mhz 21164 processors with the motherboard for $250 new. This is more horsepower than anything intel has to offer and it runs Linux, BSD, OpenVMS, Digital Unix and NT very well. I benchmarked it's I/O and, with a 256-bit memory bus, it has about 800MB/s memory throughput UNDER EMULATION MODE with Wintune95. Doing RC-5 DESII keys, I can crack about 7 million keys per second. It's 64-bit today. For $250, I would like to see anyone put together a motherboard+processor that could compete. String about a dozen of these together and you have one mean Linux cluster!

And so does Soltek. Dual-capable Slotkets has been around for a while. What is new about these new batches of slotkets (MSI 6905D, Soltek SL-02A8 and Powerleap) are that they allow changing the FSB (which you can probably set on the motherboard) and the core voltage (which you generally can't).

Tom Pabst, of Tom's Hardware fame, recently took a Kryotech K6-3 500 system and utilizted the cooling system to overclock an Intel processor to 618Mhz. The 618Mhz Celeron cooked the P3-500 and all other processors in it's way. He entitled his article "The World's Fastest PC."

If I had cash, I would make a Dual Celeron system o/c'd to 618Mhz a piece, 256meg of RAM, all running on a Tyan Thunderbolt motherboard. Got my SCSI and ethernet built right in. Pop in a Diamond MX300. I'd wait for Metabyte to license there new technology to Diamond. Using PGP, I'd have 4 Viper 770s running in parallel. Can you the best gaming rig in existence?

Cyrix chips may make wonderful hobs to cook on, but they really dont make much of a CPU -- after my brief encounter, I would never touch a Cyrix again, and I know a few others who wouldn't tough them either.

I doubt that the larger cache on a PII would make that much of a difference

consider that if you're dealing with a 20Mb image, then the cache will do very little so far as reading is concerned, and the 512Kb will only make an effective difference over the 128Kb cache if you are writing back between 64Kb and 256Kb of changed data -- otherwise the cache will be force to continuously flush data, and be no help writing, (and not be able to do much with reading back either) OR (on the

That said, I don't know that much about the current caches that are used in processors, so I could well be wrong about this -- anyone care to comment?

I was just about to buy a dual processor PII-400 system because I didn't want to make the modifications to two Celeron processors to make them run SMP. I hadn't heard about this before! I'll have to pick up a couple of nice (and cheap) PPGA socket 370 400 MHz chips for next to nothing and run them instead! Anyone heard anything good (or bad) about running these in a Tyan Tiger 100 board?

Xeon boards and other high-end 4-way+ SMP boards usually have memory interleaving or a crossbar instead of a system bus to keep the processors fed. I think that the 64-bit, 100 MHz memory bus in a BX chipset will be saturated rather quickly by 4-way SMP. If you need four Celerons, build another box and rlogin.

Damn, what can't be done with a Celeron that wasn't intended? You can overclock them like mad, you can put them in an SMP config, you can make them as fast or FASTER than a PII. Can you make warpcores and teleporters with them too?:op

Now, I wonder if there's an adapter for the older card-mounted Celeries. That would definitely help.

I got a friend that has been running dual celerons on the Tyan Tiger 100 boards with zero problems. I was actually going to build a system utilizing this mobo also. He is hitting 450 no problem, but having some trouble hitting 504mhz. Each processor boots individually at 504, but in SMP they don't do it for long, (i.e. lsting about 5 mins before locking). The liquid cooling system he is building should help though. Anyways, good luck on yer box, that motherboard should make a fine choice.

Actually, I never had any respect for Cyrix. Every machine I used with Cyrix chips seemed grossly underpowered for my needs. While some people would argue that there are many users that don't need the full blown power of a PII(I) and I agree with them, I'd rather steer these users to AMD and Celeries...

A lot of the comments are "wow I gotta get me one!" but not all of the slot 1 convertors do the magic SMP thing - many (most?) of them still need some rework to get SMP going. Search for "dual celeron trick" to find the japanese page that did this first, they have a list of adapters, and how well they work.

This looks like a really nice way to go. I tried the drill/solder trick, and finally got it going, but it was really flaky, and kept crashing my box. Which was bad. It's really hard to solder the wires onto the fingers on the edge of the card, and then cram it into the slot without disconnecting and/or shorting the wire. I gave up for a while, then tried some resoldering, and fried one of the celerons.:-( Oh well, I knew what I was getting into, it was only about $60.

This looks fool-proof, and the PPGA celerons are cheaper these days anyway. Guess I'll have to go blow another $160 or so.:-)

Go to kryotech.com..... spend about $500 after S/H for the renegade case..... It will be worth it (however this case is designed for only one CPU, but I've been told that in most problems with dual CPU overheat, one CPU getting really effective cooling can make the difference)

Hmmm, that would be tricky. I've read about some new utility programs that let you run multiple independent instances of an OS on the same machine - that *might* be a way to get a server/client combo to work. Otherwise I have strong doubts.

I know I should have gone with one of the 'recommended' boards, but I opted for a locally-available Gigabyte GA-6BXD. This cost around $150 iirc, and works great. Like many, I run two Cel 300's o'ced to 450. But I have one slot and one socket cel using an earlier version of the MSI adapter. I had to mod the slot cel and the adapter to overclock and run dual. I also had to up the voltage to 2.2V. This adapter should make the dual celeron a much simpler project;)

Getting 550 out of a 366 is certainly the holy grail of OCing for the last few months.

It's only occured in rare, or extreme, instances. The Medichino ( sp, damn those silly rivers Intel uses for names) core can't really get much past 520~530 Mhz reliably. We'll need a die shrink, FSB increase to drop the multiplier, and 133-rated RAM before we start to see miracles like the 450A happen again.

your best bet is to hang out at 5.5x83. Should be quite nice, just make sure your video card can handle it. You machine stil lays the smack down at at cool dual 457;)

>UNDER EMULATION MODE It should be noted that FX32, the 32bit x86 emulation program that is used under NT to run "legacy" software does that fancy dynamic recompilation stuff, so after running an app for a while, it will have translated the whole thing into RISCy alpha instructions. Also, all system calls are native, so it's not really Bytecode for Bytecode emulation.

Forgot to mention the fact that my Celerons are the OEM version (not boxed, and without fan.) Any claims that the retail versions are of higher quality may or may not be true, but I've had no problems with my OEMs (and, I got to pick my own heatsink, resulting in better cooling.)

Most of the discussion I've read leads me to believe the quality of the OEM and Retail Celerons are the same, with respect to overclocking. YMMV.

We put it all together, turned it on (at 66mhz FSB, 300mhz CPUs) and installed Debian GNU/Linux. Shut it down, jumpered the motherboard to 100mhz FSB, 450mhz CPUs, turned it back on and it has (knock on wood) ran flawlessly for the last week or two (with lots of compiling, Quake 3 Arena, and so on, so it's definitely been getting beat on.)

Overall, I paid about $1500-1600 for the system (sans monitor), and can say I am _extremely_ happy with its performance. 900mhz of SMP love, running Linux no less.:)

(I can serve web pages AND play Quake 3 Arena at the same time, without losing a frame! Imagine that!)

The 300A is, by far, the most overclockable Celeron in existance. Their production has, however, been discontinued, as I understand it. If you can still get your hands on 300As for a reasonable price, you can't go wrong.

I have read many reports of people trying to OC the 333, and while some have had success, it's always been at unorthodox FSB speeds (like 83mhz), which can cause disk corruption and so forth. Running at a "supported" FSB, 66mhz or 100mhz, is recommended, and the 300A does this quite well.

I bought a two processor mainboard and I've got one PII-400 in it. The PII-400 is now cheap enough that I COULD get a second one, but for the same money I could get two Celerons and have a PII-400 left over.

Unless you have an immediate use for the leftover PII-400, I'd suggest getting the second PII-400 instead of celerons, as you'll have more cache. Just my opinion.

But on this deal, why not 2 to a board, making a 4-way system? Can that be possible?

Based other messages I've read here, I doubt that would work. The Celeron is essentially a PII, and that can only support dual processors due to a deliberate limitation imposed by Intel. For quad processors or better, you'd need Xeons.

I bought a two processor mainboard and I've got one PII-400 in it. The PII-400 is now cheap enough that I COULD get a second one, but for the same money I could get two Celerons and have a PII-400 left over. I can't decide what to do to get top performance and not waste money.

Could someone explain to me why I feel like I'm reading some kind of "Hot Rods" sports cars magazine when I'm browsing this topic?

Sorry, folks, but somehow all this sounds a bit silly to me. We all know there are lots of safety margins when chips are tested, as well as some (many?) marketing considerations when they are sold as a xxxMHz chip. I'd prefer reading about code optimization, memory footprint reduction, and generally making software much leaner than it is today...

I'm curious if anyone who has actually built a dual celeron system (w/o having to do any soldering) can help me figure out where I can obtain the cpus, mb, and the converters and about how much money this will cost (don't worry about case / ram / whatever else, I can figure that out on my own).

I don't know. I personally would go for the celerons, but I don't do anything cache intensive. Since you seem to do a lot of imaging stuff, you just might want that extra cache. On the otherhand, if you're gonna run the celerons at faster than 400MHz, the upped clock speed might offset the lack of cache.

Check out these [anandtech.com] benchmarks at Anandtech (under NT) for a general idea. Hope that helps. ----------------------------------------

Going from 2.0 to voltage besides 2.2 requires a lot more work. However, at 2.2V my procs run at 40 degrees C while running RC5. All I have on there a a nice fat super7 fan/heatsink... nothing special. That's not very hot at all... in fact, I think my old K6 233 ran hotter.

Yeah, I wasn't thinking in that context. You definitely have to rember that it is possible to fry the processor, and be careful. For those of you who might be thinking of trying to change the voltage by cutting traces with an exacto knife (you might do this because these newer voltage-adaptable slotkets are hard to find), be VERY careful. If you don't cut through one of the traces completely, it will run the processor at 3.4V, which will destroy it. But if you do it right, you get a great deal. ------------------------------

I've been running dual ppga celeron 300a's overclocked to 450 for a couple of months now, and it works just great. Oldmanrant:But back in my day we had to solder to pins on the adapter to be able to dual them, and then cut 3 traces on the pcb with an exacto knife to increase the voltage from 2.0 to 2.2 volts (they wouldn't run stably at 450 at 2.0 volts). You youngins have it so easy.

Seriously, the best part about the card is probably the ability to change the voltage, so newer celerons can easily be overclocked too. --------------------------------------

Your comment is probably true towards certain games and applications that spend most of the times utilize small pages of main memory. PII will likely a Celery when you begin to use serious applications such as Photoshop.

Wow, this completely set my RC5 processing farm calculations on their side. For about $20 (see pricewatch) you can get on one of these things and essentially turn a PPGA celeron into a Pentium II.

Best price/performer?

Dual Cel366 @ $466, gets ~695 blocks (2^28 keys) per day That's $0.66 per block on the first day!

Most Pentium II's average around $0.90 per block on the first day, with 450s being well over a dollar.

-Chris

[Price based on: SuperMicro P6DBE motherboard, 32MB PC100 ram, case, nic, floppy, trident video, cpus, and cpu card. Boot off a floppy disk to the network, mount a linux partition and start grinding. No network? Make a dos boot disk and put the client on it. Every once in a while, take the disk out, flush its blocks, and put the disk back in.]

Now, you have a riser board, with 2 CPU's on it. The riser board handles bus-arbitration between it's 2 CPU's itself, remembers who won, and then passes the arbitration request onto the motherboard. If the motherboard allocates the riser card the bus, the riser card send the signal to the winning CPU.

So the CPU's arbitrate for the riser's bus, and the risers arbitrate for the motherboard's bus.

It'll be a little slower (extra step involved in getting the bus) and bus contention will be higher (4 devices now on the GTL+(?) bus) but it should be able to be done.

Any budding hardware techies out there willing to give it a try?

This idea is CopyRight(C) Mark James 1999. People are free to copy and use this idea for their own purposes. If you actually get it to work, I want one. Or is that what the GPL is for?

Young upstarts, back in the real old days you had to drill holes into your celerons and if you missed you killed the whole chip not just a cheap rise board; why I modified 6 secc celerons and killed nary a one. These newfangled things are just to easy

I'm more concerned with people who may want to give this a try for the first time without knowing some rough boundaries.

What scared me initially was that the link showed that a person could up the voltage to 2.6V! They had a warning that they don't guarantee that components would work properly when manually set, but they didn't mention that higher voltages could damage the CPU.

Most people just regurgitate the same old crap. See the post above about 'arbitration' etc. Fact is, some Japanese techie nutter will prob be running quad ppga's per Slot 1 inside six months and sticking eight on a dual board for fun. There's no technical reason why it can't be done with circuitry on the slocket as an interface between the cpu and board chipset. Think about it. Everything you thought you knew is questionable after all.

Actually, I have a lot of respect for the 6x86 series from cyrix. The problem with the thing is that cyrix insists on that silly PR rating because they cant get the clock rates up (I don't think fabbing them with 486 type technology helps much, but the alpha is fabbed with 486 tech too... he he he) When you compare the cyrix clock to clock with the offerings from intel and AMD the cyrix looks pretty good. Admittedly the math isn't up to intel spec's (which is almost always an unfair comparison because of pentium math pipeline optimizations) but it pretty much matches the AMD at same clocks again. If cyrix could get these things up to 500mhz tomorrow then you would see cyrix giving intel a run for their money again (lest you forget the reason the celery is around in the first place, it was because cyrix was selling a 133mhz cpu at intel's 133mhz price point but calling it a 166 because it got a little better than pentium 166 performance in the benchmark of the day (which was winbench)). Of course cyrix would probably insist on calling it a PR600 which would piss a bunch of quake heads off because they bought a cheap CPU only to discover it didn't do as well in their favorite game as the similarly priced Intel. On the other hand the tiny minority of people who use win '95 for development, surfing the web, or writing papers for school (and later turn it into a linux box) but don't play quake would think it a great cpu because they paid for a 133mhz cpu that gets a lot more performance than anyone else's 133mhz cpu.

BTW has anyone noticed that a PIII-450 on pricewatch is cheaper than a PII-450 or a K6III-450?

My system: Dual Celeron PPGA 300@450, a Gigabyte GA-686BX-D, two MSI 6905'ers( the old version, had to spend half an hour or so to solder a small wire from B75 to AN15 ) It has been running rock-stable for almost a month, doing a lot of different stuff from kernel compiling to mp3-compressing:o) Running RC5-64 client on it, the primary cpu completes blocks at 1.26 Mkeys/s, and the grand total comes to 2.34 Mkeys/s for both cpus. This is only +85.7% performance for the second cpu, I had been expecting at least 90%, but I guess I can live with that:-) The total cost for the board, SlotKETs and cpus was just below 450$, not including shipping costs, but if I had only bought a single-cpu mobo + one processor and OC'ed it to 450, that system would still have had a performance equal to a P2 450 and compared with the Alpha 21164 system previously mentioned in other Comments, it would be just as cheap and almost twice as fast. I checked the specs for the Alpha 21264, and it seems that my dual system more or less has equal performance to a system with one of those, but at an incredibly much lower price.

One slightly annoying thing about the Gigabyte board was, that after turning on virus protection in the BIOS, and then trying to boot, it started complaining about a virus in my MBR(LILO?), and gave one more warning about my operating system not being supported, and then it booted just fine. I think I will give Gigabyte a hard time about this, asking them for a new BIOS that knows about Linux(LILO)

UPDATE: I found out that my bad (fast, but busy) connection was causing a lot of waiting-for-blocks for the rc5-client, so after I had recieved 1000 blocks by e-mail, the figures look a little different - still 1.26 Mkeys/s for one processor, but 2.47 Mkeys/s for two processors. This means that the gain from having a second processor is about 96% - a LOT better than I had imagined.

Yeah, and furthermore, the Celeron A cache is on die, meaning it runs at full core speed, whereas the Pentium II cache only runs at half-speed. This is what usually offsets.

I've had Celeries (2 Slot 1 300As, 1 PPGA 300A) clocked at 450/464 running at home and here at work (one has been chugging along since August), and there is absolutely no difference between them and a real PII 450, at least on nothing I've tried (I run a bunch of junk: standard office stuff, audio and photo editing, various server-side stuff, 3D games, you name it).

Depends.... are you looking for a single or dual slot mobo? If single, go with the ABIT BX6 Series 2 (the slightly older ABIT BH6 is fine, too, if you're looking to save a few bucks). If dual, get an ASUS P2B-D2. Both are totally stable, very well supported, and equally well made. Moreover, they're cheap, especially for what you're getting.

As always, check www.pricewatch.com for the best deals.

I'm sure others will disagree, but I have worked with several dozen brands of boards over the last couple of years, and the only mobo manufacturers I'd really feel comfortable recommending to anyone would be Abit, Asus, and Chaintech. Abit is my personal favorite, due to a variety of factors (5 PCI slots, frequent BIOS updates, etc.), but the coolest thing about their boards is that you can manually set the clock multiplier, bus speed, and, the most overlooked element of good overclocking: CORE VOLTAGE SETTINGS, in the BIOS setup, meaning you don't have to futz with jumpers. It rocks.

I hate to sound like an AOLer, but I agree completely. Cyrix is shite. I once had a TI-branded 486 DLC-40 designed by Cyrix, and that wasn't too bad I guess, for the times, but their P5-P6 class is a farce. I suppose Cyrix is fine if all you do is Word and Netscape, but it just doesn't hack it for any serious users.

It's like this: comparing Intel's and Cyrix's FPUs is like comparing McBain to Mr. Burns.

Umm...ok. It's nice to see you can score cheap crack in your town, but your dealer is probably hooking you up with some substandard cut. Qualify your ridiculous statement that the BH6 "has many problems." I'd love to hear it. Honestly.

I run one at home with an overclocked C300A, I run one at work with the same exact setup. My boss runs one. A small legion of my coworkers and friends do, too. Plus the tens of thousands of geeks the world over who gush over this board. Furthermore, I work as the assistant PC product manager at a large public university (40K students, 18K fac/staff), and we have sold hundreds of these boards to people. Guess who is the primary support contact for them? That's right, me! Guess what? Of all of the BH6s that we've sold, exactly one came back bad, and that was because some llama screwed up a BIOS flash. I hot-swapped it with the BIOS in my own board and reflashed it, and it was off to the races. Thus, I have _never_ truly seen a bad BH6.

Sorry to be rude, but get a clue. ABIT's board is awesome. Anyone who recommends a Soyo over it hasn't a clue.